Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

“Radi-wTzai?” demanded Justice Moore.

“Radiesthesia, your honor. The lay word is dowsing— for the location of water with a forked hazel wand.”

“Nonsense, Mr. Winters. Dowsing is dowsing. Nothing supernatural about it. Back in Louisiana my father was the village dowser. I’ve dabbled in it a little myself.”

“I’m no expert, your honor. But I understand that at least five Nobel prize winners consider radi— dowsing, that is, a valid form of psi.”

Edmonds stole a glance down at Godwin. The old man’s head was propped in his cupped hand and his eyes were closed. Pendleton had better hurry up.

The Chief Justice interrupted. “We seem to have taken you somewhat over your allotted time with our questions, Mr. Winters. In fairness to opposing counsel, and since our two-thirty adjournment is nearly at hand, I will ask that you draw to a close.”

“This concludes the case for New York, your honor.” “Thank you. We stand adjourned.” He stood up.

The clerk began his intonation: “All rise . . .”

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is not a good thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body

—Aristotle

In the robing hall Helen Nord took Godwin by the arm. “I’m having some friends over tonight. We want you to come. Ben can pick you up.”

“Thank you, my dear. But I don’t know. I’d just be in the way. It’s disgraceful to be old. You know what they say. Tired old man. Helen, I know I should retire, and I’m going to. But I don’t want Roly Burke to think he’s forcing anything. Actually, my resignation is already written. I will send it to the President the day we decide Tyson”

“No!”

“Yes. Oh, I’m not truly senile. Not yet. With a little help from Gus I can still crank out a passable decision. But I’m tired, Helen. Tired.” His mustache drooped. “That’s the only reason. I’ve told Ben, and now you. Later, I’ll tell Pendleton. Until then, this is all in confidence.”

“Of course.”

“And no fuss and feathers at the end. No stupid sentimental retirement banquet. No idiotic gold watch, no initialed attache case, no desk set. Maybe just a photograph of something familiar with a farewell card that all of you can sign. I would treasure it.”

“However you want it.”

He stood silent a moment, thinking. “Your party. I miss Laura’s* parties. All the old friends are gone. Ah, the times we used to have in Georgetown. Till four, five in the morning. I wish Laura could have known you. She would have liked you.” His face clouded.

“You can turn in any time. You know where the guest room is.”

He brightened. “In that case, I think I’ll come.” He put his arm around her shoulders and tried for his best leer. “Just down the hall from your bedroom.”

“And what’s a mere eighty-five years between friends?”

“That’s my line, you forward wench!”

These judges, you will infer, must have something of the creative artist in them; they must have antennae registering feeling and judgment beyond logical, let alone quantitative proof.

—Justice Felix Frankfurter

Helen Nord lived on a two-hundred-acre farm near Port Royal, Virginia, an hour’s drive to the Court by superhighway. Washington had been born nearby. Grant and Lee had struggled here, and Private Corbett had shot John Wilkes Booth in a burning barn a few miles away. She had inherited the land from her Strachey ancestors, and John Nord had designed the big house himself. Her sons had been born and raised here, and now they were grown and gone. She was grateful now for other interests, other ties. A steady stream of her brother justices and their wives attended her dinners and weekend parties. Of course, she rarely had them all out together. The air was strained when Burke and Godwin were merely in the same room. Tonight was the “Godwin” group, namely those whom the old gentleman could insult without offense.

The ladies of the court had accepted her instantly as the lawful successor of Laura Godwin, and felt their own somewhat anonymous status enhanced by direct representation of their sex on the high bench. Millie Pendleton explained it to her. “Laura used to say Washington was full of famous men and the women they married when they were young. But at least we now have a friend in court.”

Just now Helen was leading a group down the garden path behind the house.

Godwin left the path and walked over to the great oak tree. Its dead leaves from the previous year were still frozen to its branches. The others waited. He called back, “You’re surfe you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind. But don’t hurt yourself.”

“Hah!” He kicked the tree trunk savagely, then danced for a moment. A forlorn dead leaf floated down and hung in his mustache. He flicked it off indignantly. As he rejoined the group, he explained matter-of-factly, “I was born in Manhattan, in a hospital next to the old Third Avenue El, in the days when they still used those wonderful steam locomotives. Laura loved the country, but I hate it, with its pure air and the crickets raising cain at night. So Helen lets me kick a tree when I come out here.” (They had all seen this many times before.) “Now let’s get on to this well.”

Helen Nord laughed. “It’s right over here, Judge.” She led them to a pit some five feet in diameter, edged with a couple of layers of loose cinder blocks, then called back to Moore. “Nick, there’s your well.” She pointed to a length of pipe extending up from the pit. “We put the casing in today. The driller hit water at fifty feet—forty gallons a minute. He brought the county agent and the state geologist out. They just looked at it and shook their heads. The geologist had already proved from his maps it was impossible.”

“But why all the excitement about a water-well?” demanded Godwin. “The way you’re carrying on, anybody would think you had struck oil.”

“When you’re on a farm, twenty miles from a city main, water can be more important than oil. But the point I’m making is, Nick Moore showed me where to drill. That was after I had brought in three dry holes, one of them at a hundred twenty feet. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

Moore grinned. “Right.”

“What are you getting at?” asked Mrs. Pendleton.

“He did it by dowsing.”

“No! Water-witching? But I thought that was an old wive’s tale.”

“It’s real. Many people can do it. Actually, it’s a recognized form of psi. At argument today we learned it has a fancy scientific name: radiesthesia.”

“Fantastic!” breathed Millie Pendleton.

“We’d better be getting back.”

“Bill,” said Mrs. Blandford, “why do you keep looking up at the sky?”

“No reason at all, dear,” said Blandford lamely. “Just thinking about the flight to Miami I canceled.”

“I’m glad you did. You can go next week. This is much nicer.”

“The farm is directly under the flight line from National Airport to Miami,” said Helen Nord quietly. “We always see it out here. It seems to be late this evening.”

After dinner she led them back into the parlor. Ben Edmonds followed with a tray of cigars and liqueurs.

When they were all settled, their hostess began, almost hesitantly: “I want to tell you a story, and then I am going to ask a question of each of you. This has a bearing on the Tyson case. To start, I think there is something about me all of you should know. Mr. Winters, at argument today, hinted very strongly that there were probably three or four psi’s on the court. I don’t know for sure, but I think I may be one of them. I do know that I have had at least one psi experience. I’ve even wondered whether I should disqualify myself on the Tyson case. At any rate, I’d like to tell you about it. It took place when my husband died in the first manned Mars flight. It was two-ten on a warm August morning when he lasered back to Orbit Central that the retro rockets wouldn’t fire. They analyzed the trouble almost instantly. There was a relay malfunction. They lasered back and told him how to fix it. And he did fix it. And then the retros did fire. But it had taken three minutes for his message to travel thirty-five million miles to Earth, and another three minutes back to Mars. Six minutes was too long. He was barely eight hundred miles above the planet when the retros worked, and he was traveling over four thousand miles an hour. He hit ground at one thousand miles an hour. The ship—everything in it—simply vaporized. The point I wish to make is, when he pressed the retro button at two-ten, and nothing happened, I knew. And I knew at two-ten. Orbit Central didn’t know until they actually received his call, at two-thirteen. I was with him all the way down. He talked to me.” She looked over at Edmonds, almost curiously. “We held hands. And then I died with him. Except, of course, here I am. Some of the other astronaut wives have had similar experiences. Mine didn’t surprise the medical people at NASA. In fact, they not only didn’t tell me I was crazy—they put me to work in the Parapsychology Section. They were trying to develop psi as an alternate to laser communication, to avoid the time lag of six minutes for a round-trip message, or even to substitute completely in case of laser failure. Actually, there’s nothing new about the principle. The Dutch psi Croiset had already demonstrated that engine defects can be diagnosed across the Atlantic Ocean by clairvoyance. Distance is no difficulty.”